DIE TAGESZEITUNG (www.taz.de)

Interview with Heath Bunting.

"Just stand around on the streets" 


?: I understand you used to do graffiti, before you started
to do work on the internet. Can you describe how you
developed from painting on walls to writing HTML-Code?

Heath Bunting: It's not a progression really. It is very
difficult to make your life linear. I still do graffiti. I
was arrested with Rachel Baker the other day in London for
doing graffiti.


? Could you describe your graffiti?

Bunting: We generally use chalk from the River Thames. I
like chalk, because it is temporary, and also somehow
escapes the labeling of hip hop. You can be chalking
somewhere, and people can't tell necessarily that you are
doing something illegal. Whereas when you have a spray can
or a pen, they know immediately that you are being
rebellious.


?: Why graffiti? Why not some other medium, like painting.

Bunting: Because I could never afford those things. Chalk is
very cheap. A box for 40 pence can last you a week.
Accessibility has always been a big issue for me. And also,
I am not looking for recognition from the art world. I want
to do things that have an effect on everybody. Graffiti is
on the street, and everybody sees it, wether they pay
attention or not.


?: But the concept that the streets are public space at all
has become questionable in the last couple of years with the
emergence of shopping malls and private ownership of public
space...

Bunting: By going out on the street and doing things in
public, private spaces will be reclaimed. Rachel and I went
out and made some of this private spaces our own again. The
"London" internet project is a bit like that. It is about
things we did in the city of London, that we took those
spaces, and made them our own for a while. I could tell you
a story about every place that is in the photographs in "A
Visitor's guide in London", about things we have done there
at that time.


?: I noticed that a lot of net artists travel around all the
time. Is this inherent in the medium with which they work?

Bunting: For me it is the most viable funding method. I get
paid for giving talks. At the moment it is very boring for
me to have an apartment. So for me this is a way to travel
around without having to sleep outside all the time. I
haven't had an apartment since September, I have been
traveling continously since last June. And I enjoy doing it,
it's very challenging.


The internet is a technology that makes that possbile. Maybe
ten or twenty years ago, there would have been a different
way of networking. Maybe a hundert years ago, it would have
been a name. If I was a certain type of aristocrat, I could
have turned up in a court in India in rags, and I would have
just said my password, and I would have been admitted and
treated very well. In those days it was your name. There are
other passwords now, that give you access to certain things.


?: In the subtitle "The visitor's guide to London" is called
"psychogeographic". What do you mean by that?

Bunting: The work was six month of walking around London
with no particular aim. I found myself going to the same
places, on the same routes. I was trying to find out why I
would walk to the same places, and I discovered things like
underground rivers and roman walls. So these things are
known as psychogeography.


?: Are these drifts though the city related to surfing the
internet?

Bunting: I don't really surf the internet. I take great
pleasure in wandering around cities, and see what happens,
and London is a good place to do that. If you ever get
bored, you just go out your door, and within a few minutes
something interesting is happening.

?: Do you think that "Visitor's guide to London" is a "net
specific work"?


Bunting: No. I originally did it on a floppy, but it
translated easily to the Web. I was working in multimedia at
the time I did the piece. People around me were thinking
hard what they could put on a CD- Rom: colourful images,
audio, video, whatever. The "Visitor's guide" was made on
these very big computers, but it looks like it is low-tech.
You can put it on one floppy disk. So it is a like an
anti-statement against multimedia.

?: One of the characteristics is that people can "take you
work apart", which makes net art different from traditional
painting or sculpture. Does it matter to you that people can
look at the source code, how a piece is done?

Bunting: My work isn't very complicated to assemble in the
first place. I use very simple things. I have been
experimenting with a self-assembly web site. I removed the
index page recently, so you could see all the files. There
is a Read.me file that suggest where you can start.


?: I recently send you some email, that was returned,
because your adress has changed from your name to a number.
Is this another art project?

Bunting: I was trying to find a way to cut down on junk mail
to my email account, and I came up with the concept of an
algorhythmic identity. I change my email adress now every
month in a way that is very easily predicatable to humans,
but not to a computer. I chose the date, the month and the
year, something most western humans would know. So my email
adress currently is jun97@irrational.org. Every month the
previous adress will be deleted, and if you send mail to
this adress, you get an auto-reply saying: This identity is
now expired, please reformat in this form. Since I've done
that my email has gone from 50 a day to just about five. I
don't get any stupid messages anymore.


I will also retire as a professional artist in November, and
I will go into hiding for a while. Than I will come back,
and charge more money. Because I have become
professionalized, my work load is a lot more now. And I
don't have time anymore to walk around the streets and play,
and I have to act in a proper manner in certain situations.
I want to retreat from that.


?: Did doing art on the internet help your career as an
artist?

Bunting: Oh, yes, it helped me a lot. My name became very
well known. As the internet hype took off in London, every
day I would get two or three journalists wanting to
interview me, because I was doing things on the internet and
was prepared to talk about it. At that time most of the
people doing things on the net were hackers, and they were
very shy with the media. My art career has risen a lot
because of that. I didn't intend to have an art career, but
I allowed it to happen. Being at the documenta is very
problematic for me. I never intended to be here. This is my
forth exhibition ever. So it is all new to me. Now galleries
are offering to do things with me. And I have to think hard
about this. I probably won't become a commodity artist,
because it will upset my work and what I am trying to say.
That is one reason why I want ro retreat from this scene.


?: What are you going to do?

Bunting: Oh, just stand around on the streets. Maybe do some
things on the net. But then again, there might be a new
medium. The thing with the net is that in the last couple of
years it has been a new religion: the virtuality religion.
And if I see something like that, I try to bust it. I try to
break things. That's my secret agenda: To break down
civilisation. (laughs)

?: Do you see your own projects on the web as subversive?

Bunting: I try to do things that provoke discussions of
issues or ideas. For example I am doing something with
search engines now. Several years ago, people would register
names of large corporations like McDonalds, so if McDonalds
would want to go on the net, they had to buy these domain
names from them. That time is past now. And there won't be
active censorship. The real issue now is visibility or
invisibility, and that is made possible with search engines.
So people will buy their way into the ranking of search
engines. I do that with programming tricks. Right now, if
you go to Web Crawler and type in "Nike", the first ten
adresses will be my pages, and all it says there is "This
URL is for rent", so Nike can rent it back from me.


At least half of my projects could be turned into a
business, for example my begging project: I did begging on
the net for one week, and got send 1500 pounds. I made a
form where you can send Mastercard or Visa donations to
myself, and then I inserted it into corporation's or
government guestbooks over the period of a week. A lot of
people found it entertaining, and sent me money. But I
didn't actually cash that money. I assume that most of the
credit card information that was send to me was from stolen
credit cards anyway. It's not so interesting for me to do
business.


?: Do you mind that projects like that don't noticed very
much?

Bunting: I suspect that 90 percent of what I have done is
lost, expecially things I did on the streets. Documentation
is really a way to commodify your work. A documentation can
be sold, and that's what I am trying to avoid. I have never
sold any of my works. It used to be a policy of mine, never
to make things that could be sold.

Tilman Baumgaertel